Brexit and Whatever After - ac-matra

03/07/2016
Brexit and Whatever After | City Journal
EYE ON THE NEWS
Brexit and Whatever After
Lots of thinking and rethinking in Europe, but alas, not much clarity
Theodore Dalrymple
June 30, 2016
The prospect (but, as yet, not the certainty) of Brexit has concentrated the minds of
European leaders. Their minds, unfortunately, are those of mediocrities. It is not I
who says so, but Laurent Wauquiez, former French minister for European affairs
under President Nicolas Sarkozy and possible future candidate for the French
presidency. He is in a position to know. “I thought that Europe needed an
electroshock,” Wauquiez said in a post­Brexit interview in Libération. “Europe
dissatisfies its peoples. Everyone knows it. But the present political class, with its
profound mediocrity, has done nothing to change it.”
Asked whether he would have voted to leave (he had thought of lending a hand to
the Leave campaign before the referendum), he replied: “I am not British. Let us have
the clarity to recognize that the result would have been the same in any other country
in the EU. Perhaps an even greater rejection in France.” Speaking of his own
experience in Brussels, he said: “My time in the Ministry of European Affairs was a
shock, a confrontation with reality. No one, with a minimum of clear­sightedness,
could go down the corridors of Brussels without having the sincerity to recognize
that it doesn’t work.”
What is Wauquiez’s solution? Is it to abandon the whole business, except as a free­
trade area, as the British were misled more than 40 years ago into believing that it
would be? No: he believes in expelling between 15 and 20 of the member states and
forming a hard core of seven to 12 others “ready to accept a harmonization of tax and
social regulations . . . . The hard core must exclude tax and social dumping.”
It seems to have escaped Wauquiez’s notice that his proposal would require either
that France abandon its 35­hour workweek (the attempt to do so by François
Hollande’s government has so far caused weeks of disturbances) or that it be
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Brexit and Whatever After | City Journal
imposed on Germany . This would be the best recipe for provoking Franco­German
hostility, were it not that the French minister of the economy, Emmanuel Macron,
recently proposed a better one: namely that the Germans adopt fiscal “solidarity”
with the rest of Europe by paying for everyone else’s debts and deficits. According to
Wauquiez, differences of policy aren’t competition; they are dumping.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum—if it can really be called a
spectrum—Arnaud Montebourg, Hollande’s former minister of the economy and
another possible presidential candidate, was even less complimentary about the E.U.
than Wauquiez. “[Brexit] is a shock for Europe, but a foreseeable one,” he told Le
Monde. “For 20 years, every time the people have been consulted, they have
expressed their rejection of the construction of Europe as it has been imposed on
them. . . . The construction of Europe as it has been done is anti­democratic.”
Montebourg blames “an extremist liberal project,” by which he means liberal in the
economic sense. “The French voted in 2012 for the program of the French Left,” he
said. “And they got the policy of the German Right.” Anyone with a guess as to why?
For Montebourg, the European Union “is like a bankrupt company. If it is not
restructured, it will die.” He suggests a return to real national borders, the reduction
of the number of European bureaucrats by 97 percent, the ending of the tendency to
regulate the cocoa content of chocolate or the market for goat’s cheese, the return of
money­issuing powers to the various countries’ central banks (while keeping the
Euro), and an alliance of the grasshoppers (France, Spain, and Italy) against the great
wicked ant, Germany. What a wonderful way to promote peace and harmony
between France and its neighbor across the Rhine!
With the totality of Montebourg’s solutions, one might wonder what need there ever
was for a union, rather than a mere free­trade area, just as the British always said they
wanted. But this is to forget the slogan on the Haitian national emblem, l’union fait la
force—unity makes strength. Of course, it hasn’t worked very well yet for Haiti. Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the
Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by aja84/iStock
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